We don't know what what is first, chicken or egg. Your body is only thinking about surviving the next 5 or 10 minutes. It's not thinking about reproduction and rehealing and regeneration and all of those things. It's just in survival mode. So, we actually losing the ability to think. You say we have bigger brains. We're not using them right. We're not using them right. That's exactly what's happening. And you know it's not genetic because when the orthodontist move the teeth to where they think they should be, where do the teeth go when you don't wear your retainer? That field kind of covers the whole anthropology and evolvement of human beings. The fact that they're chewing on on much harder foods, I think stimulates that that development. I remember from dental school, I had one of the patients who had almost no teeth left. Adrenaline, your blood sugar goes up and now you're laying in bed. You're supposed to run or fight. So, they use ozone to disinfect the water supplies. You're chewing on both sides. Now, we're eating such soft foods that we've turned into two-sided chores and we're not creating that strain. Dentistry is kind of a separate corner in this whole medical field. Welcome to the Ask the Dentist podcast with Dr. Olga Dogear, where your smile meets your overall health. Okay, welcome to Ask the Dentist podcast. I'm here with you, Dr. Olga Dogear. Um this podcast was created to find the best information and meet different dentists and medical professionals and talk about different fields. Today I have a special guest. His name is Dr. Inga Man. Uh he is integrative dentistry specialist. So his profession is dentist but he also specializes in his practice is focused on airways and integrative medicine. Correct. So, Dr. Ingo, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When I was um researching your topics and I was I've run into integrative medicine field and I wanted to ask you since you've been practicing for quite a long time, right? 40 years. 40 years. Yes. I just had my 40-year reunion from Bible school. Wow. That's amazing. That's amazing. And that that is a good example for future professional that you stayed in this profession for long time and still practicing. Um tell you had a very interesting career. You did. Okay. Okay. A lot of changes in 40 years. So that's what I wanted to ask you since you've been in this field for so long. Tell us how dentistry evolved for the during those 40 years. Well, I think we all go to dental school and get trained in a very conventional way by, you know, people that have probably graduated 50 years before us. And people always say, "Oh, you know the latest when you come out of dental school." And you realize that, you know, actually very little when you graduate from dental school. And I always liked learning new things and using the latest, you know, materials and equipment. I come from a family of German engineers and uh so I always had I was always one of the early adopters. I got into the cerak the cat cam technology where you make the the crowns and restorations in one visit back in 1995. Oh wow. Before when it had said semens on the machine. Yes. Yes. It was the first ones. Yeah. Yeah. And then I got into and then I got into the cosmetic. I really enjoyed doing that and that's when I started going kind of more metal free. Got it. And u and I got into that more for the aesthetics and the physical properties, not so much for the health reasons. But what ended up happening is that I got this reputation that hey Dr. Man will take out these fillings for you. Do a good job and and replace them with the with the take out the mercury and the metallic fillings. And so all of a sudden these patients were coming in and bringing me pamphlets for Dr. Huggin and the OOMT. And I'm looking all all this going, you know, this actually makes a lot of sense. And once you open that door and you learn about it, I don't think you can. It's one of those things you can't unsee. Yeah. And I really felt like I was really helping the patients a lot by the kind of dentistry we're doing. And then once I got into dentistry into airway dentistry, that was even more profound because now when you help people breathe and sleep better, you're making changes very very quickly. People come back in two or three weeks and say, "Oh my gosh, you you've changed my life with what you with what we're doing here." So it's it's been very exciting to go through all of these transitions. the whole field of dentist. I feel like I learned more after dental school a completely different different fields different areas um which we technically cover very briefly in dental school especially in integrative medicine it's such a hot new topic. Yeah. Um, and back in 2000, once I got into the holistic dentistry back in 2003 and 2004, I actually went and did a two-year integrative medicine program out in Georgetown at Capitol University. I saw that on your resume. Tell me a little bit more about it because I wanted to look into integrative dentistry, but there's no integrative dentistry. There is integrative medicine. Correct. So, how long is that program? It was unfortunately the university isn't around anymore. It was a phenomenal program. It was just once a month you would fly out there for a long weekend and it was very intense. Um, but I did it more because I wanted to be able to communicate better with my patients and I wanted to be able to communicate with the practitioners that were referring to me and it gave me a much better understanding of, you know, people coming in and talking about craniosacral and, you know, applied kinesiology and all of these things that they certainly don't, you know, teach us about that in dental school. Yes. Yes. That's a whole different world. And so it was a great way to make a connection with patients because when they started talking about some technique that they thought I was going to roll my eyes, you know, at them for I actually knew about it and they were like, "Oh my gosh, you, you know, and they felt like they were in the right place and in a safe place where they were with someone who was on the same page with them." Very interesting. Also, that field kind of covers the whole anthropology and evolvement of human beings, right? integrative medicine in general because when I looked at your book, let's talk a little bit about your book, it was interesting because I cross when I was searching about the integrative medicine integrative about Dr. Pierce, right? Um Dr. Price, Dr. Price, Dr. Price, Western Price and I heard his name multiple times through different sources. Um and I saw the name in your book. So I kind of uh started to talk tell me about this whole anthropological uh aspect. Yeah, Dr. Price was an interesting doctor. He was actually an American Dental Association doctor. He was the most decorated researcher for the American Dental Association and he started in the 20s and 30s. He went to these, you know, quote unquote primitive societies and he showed they had these fully developed jaws and beautiful teeth. There were no dentists and no scope and no toothbrushes around. Yet these people had these beautifully developed faces and and and mouths and he also showed that as as we introduced refined foods and refined sugars that they very rapidly deteriorated. So that was his big book the um you know nutrition and physical degener uh degeneration is the name of his book and then he also started studying things about root canals and when he started talking about root canals and how they could be very problematic that did not go over very well with the American Dental Association or the American Association and they very quickly kind of black balled him and really ostracized him but he was a very I mean he was a very meticulous researcher and he showed that there were all kinds of problems. It's very interesting anthropologically because I remember I wanted to join operation smile at certain point because I like volunteer work and I met um anesthesiologist who actually does operation smiles with cleft lip and pallet and she was telling me about different countries how actually what they eat affect their structures and I actually they said she was telling me a story when they went to Africa in one of those primitive tribes es to fix cleft and pallets in those u societies in need. Um one of the dentists came with them and they had nothing to do technically. There was no decay, there was no malusion. Well, you know, it's it's really interesting when I first transitioned my practice from conventional dentistry to holistic. I used to do a periodonal treatment plan for almost every patient. It would always be a restorative treatment plan and then a treatment plan to fix their gum disease. anything from mild periodontitis to, you know, full-blown bone loss. And all of a sudden, I'm seeing these holistic patients and I'm I'm not doing these these the the gum treatment anymore. So, they don't have gum issues as much. And so, I started asking them, I said, "Well, what, you know, how often do you you know, how often do you brush?" And people go, "I don't know, twice a day. How often do you floss?" You know, the usual answer, not as often as I should, which, you know, could mean anything. Uh, and I really got it down to the only difference was the diet of the patients. So that that was the only difference because their oral hygiene wasn't really any different from the conventional patients. That that sounds like now diet with all talking about diet and different type of foods. So nutrition is the key, right? And not just because this kind of leads into the the airway part of the puzzle. When we think about food and nutrition, we think about the nutritional quality of foods, but we don't always think about the consistency of foods. And you know, prehistoric man had the a diet that had the consistency of beef jerky. So, we were chewing on very hard foods. We were creating all of the strain in our jaws that was promoting the growth. And now you're in a society where, you know, children, moms are being told that breastfeeding is, you know, that bottle feeding is just as good as breastfeeding. We're eating, we're cooking our foods, we're microwaving. So, we're eating these very soft diets, and that's really what's creating a lot of these problems with these underdeveloped airways, which leads to sleep problems and all kinds of all kinds of health problems. Almost sounds like we're evolving in the wrong way. Maybe I was going to say devolving. Devolving. Yes. Because airways becoming smaller and smaller, right? Our cranium becoming bigger. And I heard about that effect of social media actually on the brain, that visual cortex becoming bigger. Yes. So we actually losing the ability to think, but we still say we have bigger brains. We're not using them right. We're not using them right. That's exactly what's happening. Yeah. So talk about nutrition. What's the difference? What do you see? What kind what type of diet those patients who don't have periodontal disease eat? Well, I think it was mainly they were eating more whole foods. Uh, so they were eating, you know, more fruits, vegetable, meats, and things like that versus, you know, like canned food and and refined sugars and potato chips and, you know, Twizzlers. So, they were really limiting the number of carbohydrates that they were refined sugars that they were eating. So, that seemed to be the biggest the biggest difference. Was it more like whole foods in terms of meats heavily on meats and less um just refined sugars or is it more carbohydrates versus fats versus I think even if you know I'm I'm not a big fan of like a vegan or vegetarian diet. I think it's very important to have a certain amount of good quality protein. But I think it's just even you know just eating you know foods that you know the the joke is kind of like anything that doesn't have a writing on it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Not. That's what I teach my patients, young moms, when I say, "Okay, buy everything what is not in pre-bag containers." Exactly. If it's not bag, if you made it at home, that's good for your child. Yes. Homemade foods. Plus, now it sounds like more and more studies coming out about ketones, right? So, more you can get ketones from good fats, right? And well balanced proteins because essential acids you cannot I know. Those are the things that it's almost everything that we're being told. I told my I told my son, I said, "If you learn nothing else from your dad, I said just do the opposite of what they tell you and you have a 95% chance of being right. If they tell you to eat margarine, eat butter. If they tell you to eat the egg whites, eat the yolks. If they, you know, if you know, if they tell you to stay out of the sun, go outside and and get a little sunshine." And really, we're being we're being so misinformed. And I actually feel badly for these people that are getting this misinformation and and they really almost don't have a chance of being healthy. How about vitamins? So, because nowadays it sounds like uh we're scared of sun. I I'm glad you brought it up because in dental school we kind of touch up on ricketetts a little bit, right? what ricketets are, but it's like an extreme of vitamin D deficiency and we don't really talk about K2B complex vitamins. What what is your input about this? Well, I think, you know, obviously our I think our food supply has been really compromised and uh and so even even if you're getting organic food, you don't know, you know, they could take that orange in Florida, throw it into a semi-trail, spray ethylene oxide in there, which is one of the things that promotes ripening, and this orange ripens in a semi-truck on the way from Florida to wherever it's going. I mean that orange is not going to have the same nutritional value as and even if it's organic, you know, you go to the store. I just went I just traveled to Europe for the first time in a while and I went to this farmers market and I just want to go back and live in Europe just because of those farmers markets. I'm smelling the food like you walk up to Strawberry, you smell it and here even and then you go to Whole Foods here afterwards and you're like this food looks horrible compared to what what we're seeing in other countries. So it's I think it's very very difficult to get good nutri. So you do I think you do have to supplement to a certain degree just because you really don't know. I mean we can't test every piece of food we buy from the store. So we don't know what we're getting. Yeah. Talking about I'm from Europe as well from Eastern Europe. So when we visit my husband's family they live on the farm. So cucumbers I cannot find out like the same tasting cucumbers anywhere else. And tomatoes. It's just amazing. amazing kind of sweet taste to them and they smell as you bring it to your face you can already smell the food which is so amazing that's amazing yeah I hope it changes because now public and I hope our government everybody becoming more and more aware that it was very detrimental for the society you might be more optimistic than me because I think ultimately it's still the corporations that are you know looking I'm all for making profit and and and you know I mean that's what drives their society but I think there's so much greed where they they're willing to say we don't care what the nutritional value is, the more money we can make off of the it's unfortunate. You almost have to that's that's kind of the bad thing about living in Arizona. Even in W. I practiced many years in Wiscon. Yeah. And it's kind of hard to grow things there. I would love to live somewhere. I've had some patients moved to Tennessee. I go, "Oh my god, that would be the perfect place to live where you could have this big garden and grow your own vegetables almost year round." I go, "That would be amazing." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's almost what you have to do is have a have a little greenhouse and grow your own. That's not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. So, nutrition is the key. Sounds like it. What about air waste? Uh something you do heavily in your practice. My understanding in and um this is I think it's such a valuable field because we see airways I'm in pediatric side. We see this issues very early and there is a common belief there's not much we can do about it. Um but then if life through the life this person which we see as a child progressed and then they are suffering more and more and more and then certain point we reaching the sleep apnea and then CPEP machine it sounds like the only option and traditional approach. Tell us more what do you know about airways in dental field? Well, it starts, you know, it starts in the womb and and how baby is born. And then, of course, the big thing is is the breastfeeding. There was an article in the it was the journal of functional orthodontics back in 2001 that showed that the real benefit of breastfeeding is the actual physical act of breastfeeding. And I kind of joke with my patients, I would rather see a baby drink formula out of a mother's breast than mother's milk out of a bottle because that early functional orthopedics that's happening with the jaw literally forms the the the foundation of our health for the rest of our life. So when those when those structures are underdeveloped from from you know birth on that's something that's really hard to recover from. Now fortunately they are. We're using an appliance that's an epigenetic appliance that still allows us to reexpress our DNA more optimally. So, you know, for people who aren't familiar with epigenetics, we have our our genetic blueprint, but how that is expressed is dependent on our environment and nutrition. And so, it's it's something that can still be reversed, but it's very difficult. So that early, you know, chewing on chewing on firm foods, breastfeeding, that really is where it all starts. And you know, a lot of these when you start studying this, when I started doing airway, I noticed that these were not problems that developed on these in these patients when they were 40 or 50 years old, they started telling me stories. Oh, yeah. And all the ADHD and and behavioral problems when we treat children for airway, I'm like, parents come back and they say, I have I have a different child. Wow. You know, how can you expect a child to not breathe well at night, literally be fighting for their breath all night, and then expect to sit at a, you know, at a desk in the morning and learn math? I It's just not going to happen, you know. And then what do they do? They label them and give them medication, which probably makes a sleeping problem even worse. Yeah. And uh it's a really it really puts kids in a in a tough position because they're growing up in an environment that's where the deck is really stacked against them. Especially like you mentioned now they also have this poor posture where their head is down and you know we used to at least as kids we we at least we got to run around outside and get some sunshine and you know play ball with our friends and now they're doing it on a and it's so addictive kids cannot to stop doing it. So airways so you think that we can catch it early and as youngest young oneyear-old 2year-old and start working on it to improve the airway to set them up for successful life. Yeah. And that's where really we have to use that team approach because I think it's hard to be, you know, it's hard to learn about all these things. Every time I tell my patients, the more I learn, the dumber I feel because every time I learn something new, I go, "Oh my gosh, there's a whole bunch of questions I didn't even know I had." I know. So, I try to always partner with people that are already where that's already their passion. So, in our practice, we have uh someone, she's a speech language pathologist and a myofunctional therapist. And so all of the children get evaluated by her first because there are some there are some great systems like healthy start and myobrace and tooth pillow but they're not always necessarily the best. You know some kids if they have a tongue thrust habit they have a very difficult time with those appliances and they can actually and and also compliance you know getting a four-year-old to wear this piece of plastic in their mouth. Some kids are great but yeah most of them aren't. So, if we can give them some fun exercises and do some things to at least start that that developmental process that that gets them off at least on a on a better path. My functional therapy seems like it's a new field emerging. Yeah. Yeah. Because I I when I started to learn about tongue ties and airways, that was something completely new and was not touch up in dental school. No, not at all. Not at all. And they don't, you know, even they don't, they say, "We don't even know why, you know, kids have these tongue ties." I know at least some pediatricians are looking at those. I see more and more pediatricians actually aware of it because we especially I think moms want to know about breastfeeding and if children have a hard time latching on a lot of times the tongue tie is is the main reason for that. For sure. For sure. In our practice, we actually have lactation consultant who is um in we work closely with chiropractors. So we have this integrative approach for infants but for children when I run into this new appliances I still have a little bit of hesitation because like you said the there is a tool but implementation is the key. Yeah. And sometimes if we run into there is a very receptive mothers and childrens but the children but sometimes children um if they're not compliant that's a big issue. Yeah. How do you make it? And I'm looking at an an appliance. It has been around for a while. It's called the alpha appliance. I heard about that. Yeah. And it it's what I like about it is it's very similar to the to the oral appliance that I use on adults in that it's it's not a brute force appliance like um an paladal expander where you're turning the screw and physically pushing. It's light cyclical forces and that's what our body responds to. It's the chewing, the swallowing, the you know talking it walking. All those things are light onoff forces and that's what stimulates our body to grow. And that's the same thing with this with this light wire uh appliance. It's not something it's something that can be placed permanently in the mouse so compliance isn't as much of an issue. Do you see like suture expansion with it or no or just a tilt? So that one I'm just I'm just getting into and just learning about that because the more airway I do in adults, the more it makes me and of course those parents come in and say, "Hey, I have a child. Can you help?" You know, I'm seeing what it's doing for me. I don't want my child to have to go through 30 years of suffering through health problems before someone finally figures out that it's related to their breathing and sleeping. But a lot of times what I feel the controversy about it because we can fix certain things but could be we don't know what what is first chicken or egg right because the lymphatic tissue of the mouse and nose and throat uh it's actually naturally supposed to be enlarged until certain age and then lymphatic tissue kind of descending and and at that time we're also forming our airways and the pallet and ing and I I see the value of placing some type of lines because some kids genetic like you said genetically already crowded from day one like couple of teeth came in and instead of nice gaps mom's always concerned about gaps but gaps is a good thing you're lucky to have gaps but sometimes you see one year old and mom is trying her best she's nursing but when I'm looking at the dad and mom they both have kind of in long faces also had syphalic appearance so a poor kid already inheriting this. I still don't think I still don't always think of it as genetics, they probably were also in a situation where their DNA didn't get fully developed. So, I tend to always think that if you give the right environmental condition that we have the DNA blueprint and for a more fully developed jaw and we just I think that's the kind of almost like the copout that orthodontists use. It's like, well, that's just your your genetics. Yes. I I always look at it to me it's always a muscle problem. When I see crowded teeth, that means that the tongue, you know, the tongue is like a little orthodontist. It's a big biggest muscle in the world. It's a big orthodontist actually in there. And every time you swallow, the tongue is supposed to go to the roof of the mouth and push out. Well, if you have a tongue tire, that tongue is under functioning. You start engaging the muscles of the lips and cheeks to and you develop that abnormal swallow pattern. Well, now everything is pushing in and the tongue's not pushing out. Where are the teeth going to go? And you know it's not genetic because when the orthodontist move the teeth to where they think they should be, where do the teeth go when you don't wear your retainer, you know, the teeth. Yeah. The teeth don't move back because well, genetics said we should be here. It's they go back because the muscles are pushing them. So to me, it's always the teeth are where they are because that's where the I'm looking at what are the muscles doing to put the teeth where they are. Mhm. And so when I see crowding to me, I'm always thinking about how do I mix fix the muscles first, maybe create a little bit more space with something like the home block and then go in and follow up with some orthodontic treatment to do alignment at the end. But now you've got more space, you've got better muscle function, and so you so now you get a much better and more stable result. very interesting in our field like in my um because I see different um different populations technically so I notice sometimes tongue tie I definitely can see relationship between high pallet and severe tongue tie but sometimes I don't sometimes I see well mouth mouth breathing is definitely will lead to a one of those walted as well sure for sure but sometimes we see and I personally see in the practice because I believe in tongue tie and I think it does have play role. But a lot of times we see kids with a region from for example I know Hispanic origin from Mexico for example and they have the widest jaws and some of them have full tongue tie and I'm like how are you how are you compensating? I have no I've noticed the same thing especially where we practice close to the border. you know, if I get, you know, if I get a, you know, uh, someone that that's Mexican, I go, "Did you grow up here? Did you grow up in Mexico?" And I and I know what the answer is going to be. And I think their diet, I think when they're children, I think they're eating a much much firmer diet than if they're raised here in the United States. So, I think even though maybe they have the tongue tie, the fact that they're chewing on on much harder foods, I think stimulates that that development development. Yeah. But sometimes we see opposite. You see for example no tongue tie right at all. Yeah. And then the highest pallet ever and they have the sleep apnea and everything else. And there you know I think when you get into sleep and airway you realize there's so many contributing factors. There's you know there could be allergies there and you know and I'm not completely discounting genetics. I think that does play. It just seems like everybody goes right to genetics and I just noticed like wait a minute there's no I'm for sure I think there's a very big contributo factors because we know and even in dental school we do cover adenoid face remember they say adenoid face I remember it from dental school I was like okay you are adenoid face because you breathers yeah and now I think that that that group of kids or adults in the future definitely deserve more attention than just mechanical expansion and that's What we kind of do in our airway program, we start the oral plans that we do. I kind of call it the lowhanging fruit. We're we're kind of creating strain with it. We're stimulating growth of the of the maxilla. We're promoting proper tongue position. So, the tongue has to lift. It's a uniblock appliance that's higher on one side, which is really weird for dentists. We like everything to be Yeah, we love petal. Uh, but you think about when you chew when you chew beef jerky, you're chewing on both sides. Now, we're eating such soft foods that we've turned into two-sided chewers, and we're not creating that strain, you know, that big sppheninoid bone that almost all the other cranial bones are attached to. When you torque that bone, you allow the cranial bones to move. You stimulate the growth of of of those of those structures. And so, that's that's one of the things the appliance does. It creates the strain to stimulate the growth. it that block also forces you to lift your tongue an extra four or five millimeters. So you're kind of Dr. Belffor who invented the homeoplast it's like taking your tongue to the gym and then it also downregulates the autonomic nervous system because it stimulates the the vagus nerve and uh so it's really it's really interesting what that what app what that appliance is is able to do uh to get people you know to kind of replace some of the things that we're missing in modern society. So that's I call that the lowhanging fruit. Okay, let's let's tone the muscles that dilate the airway. Let's create more space and let's calm the autonomic nervous system down because when our patients are in that sympathetic fight or flight mode, fight or flight mode, your body is only thinking about surviving the next five or 10 minutes. It's not thinking about reproduction and healing and regeneration and all of those things. It's just in survival mode. And in our society, we see it more and more and more. We see this grinders. we see kids and especially I mean I remember from dental school I had one of the patients who had almost no teeth left like everything was grinded down to and that's you know the research now is showing that you know they told us I mean I used to spend so much time equilibrating bites and all these different things they're showing that it's almost all that it's a protective mechanism that that clenching and grinding helps to keep the the airway open and it has actually very little to do with stress or bite issues because It's certainly not a bite issue because when you, you know, look at what our patients do to their night guards. Their teeth aren't touching and they're still grinding like crazy because we're probably taking up more room with that night guard, you know, kind of pushing that tongue probably. Yeah, that's a good point actually your positioning of the tongue. So when you do your airway assessment for example, what are you guys focusing on? So we look at again we try to look at the whole picture. We have a we use a large field of view cone beam scan. Um, I don't just look at the minimum cross-section of the airway, kind of like what's the narrowest part of that tube going to the lungs, but I I look at the shape of the airway. You know, you want to see a fairly nice round airway. You see a lot of people, they have these flat airways, and I call that the fire hose because as soon as they lay down, it takes very little to compresses down more. Excuse me. Uh, you know, we look at their sinuses, we look at, you know, look at other tissues, we look at their turbinees. Uh, so the the the the cone beam is not necessarily the most important part of the puzzle, but it I always kind of joke that you have to play Sherlock Holmes when you're treating airway problems because there's so many different contributing uh sources. Uh we do a home sleep test and uh it's just it's it's called sleep image. You just put the it's a very simple device that is very easy for patients to do. And then we have a form called the impaired mouth assessment. probably if I just sat down with a patient and they and I looked at their this impaired mouth assessment and we look at things like are there to scalloped tongue, walted pallet, crowded teeth, uh all of those different signs and then look at how do you feel in the morning? How often do you get up at night to go to the bathroom? Do you dream? Do you have neck and back pain? So, there's a whole little if if I just had that form and sat down with the patient for five minutes, I wouldn't need X-rays or sleep studies or anything. The cool the cool thing is when I see that when I get their sleep study, I go, "Oh, I know exactly what their sleep study is going to look like." And it's it's always right on. So you can you can just from talk you do enough of these you pretty much get you the feeling and you know the people that end up in front of me of course all suffer from very similar things. So there's definitely a pattern to people who are suffering from airway issues. So our audience probably there's a lot of moms who probably have snoring husband and different age groups. So if we have a patient who has history of snoring um I know about adipulose tissue right? So adipose tissue kind of deposits and upper body and then it creates restrictions of airways. So yeah, we always think of fat going out, but you forget that it also pushes vestal fat, right? Vestal fat and nowadays I think they do dexa scan just for to determine where your fat is. Is it good fat which is on adipos tissue or is it visceral fat? So if you get an overweight patient right because the the adiposition play a huge role and because we get a lot of questions from sometimes when I do tongue ties on baby I my or little child I might ask some questions about snorting and so on. Uh it's part of my questionnaire and a lot of moms pointing on the husband he snores he snores. So tell me if you got this for example younger guy with a little bit of adapost tissue but definitely significant snoring issue how like where do you start after all this assessment? What is the treatment? How do you fix that? Well weight is kind of an interesting thing because everybody kind of thinks that oh you're overweight so as a result you're you're sleep that's a common belief right. It's actually in most cases the opposite. poor sleep. There's four there's probably four different mechanisms that can cause weight gain from poor sleep. So, one would be it affects leptin and golin, which is the appetite suppressing and and stimulating hormones. It affects cortisol levels because when you have that resistance to air flow, your cortisol goes up, your your adrenals are, you know, releasing that that, you know, adrenaline, your blood sugar goes up, and now you're laying in bed. You're supposed to run or fight and instead, you know, you're laying in bed trying to fall back asleep. So now that that that blood sugar gets converted into fat, there's u you know there's also they've done studies on showing that it affects eating habits. So poor night's sleep makes you make poorer food choices. And then finally even the balance of CO2 can make you gain weight. It wouldn't be fat but it would make you gain weight. Uh, and it's obviously uh very, you know, discouraging when you go to bed at night and you wake up in the morning and you get on the scale and you're a pound heavier and you're like, "Wait a minute, I didn't even all I did was sleep all night. I should have lost some weight." Could be water retention, right? You could water retention. Yeah. Or Yeah. The CO2 and water. That's exactly it. And uh and so of course then you know that makes you gain more weight which makes you sleep worse. So it is this this vic pathological vicious cycle and uh and so we have a lot of because men are men are generally you know easier to diagnose because they tend to there there is a protective or hormonal pro protective mechanism against airway collapse uh in women and so women are grossly underdiagnosed like everybody kind of looks for the you know the overweight guy with a little thicker neck in the middle I mean that's you know that's kind of you don't have to even guess that's your classic example but women are are underdiagnosed because they tend to have smaller events and they don't the events aren't long enough to be to register as an apnic event because everybody looks at the AHI which is the apnea hypopnia index. So how many times an hour do you stop breathing for 10 seconds or more or does your blood oxygen drop by 3% or more? So women don't tend to have severe enough events to register as an apnneic event. So they know they sleep terrible. They know they feel horrible, but they have a sleep study done and they go, "Oh, you're normal." But if you look at the respiratory disturbances and you look at their sleep quality, it's really poor. So they suffer from something called upper airway resistance syndrome. Okay? And any resistance to air flow puts your body into that fight or flight. So all night long they're in this fight or flight, but from a medical standpoint they're fine because they they're not their AHI isn't to a point where they're covered by insurance and they qualify for CPAP. Oh, I see. So women treatment of CPAP, right? Yeah. They suffer from this. Their sleep quality is poor. You look at look at the number of anxiety medications that are prescribed in this country. They never get into the proper level of deep sleep which causes body pain and you you know we get patients with fibromyalgia and all these different symptoms. You know they start getting anxiety and depression and all these things that all that a lot of times goes back to not getting enough REM sleep because they're having these little minor sleep disturbances all night long that the medical profession doesn't even really know to look for. Interesting. And so in this case, how do you treat this? What what what is the approach? Well, we again we we do from the sleep study. I can I those are the things I look at. I don't just look at I tell my patients when you when your apnea when you're getting to that age when that starts going up that's the end of the road. Your body will do everything to keep you breathing. Our bodies are intelligent. It knows that oxygen is the high priority. So, it'll do whatever it takes to u to um to keep breathing. And uh and so the nice thing is we have an appliance that is able to treat the contributing factors to sleep apnea. So, you don't have to get to that end point where your your your body is now actually not breathing. I'm looking at what's your body doing to keep you breathing like the respiratory disturbances. And the cool thing is with our appliance, we can help tone the tongue. We can downregulate the autonomic nervous system. So we can anybody really anybody could wear that appliance and benefit from it. You don't have to have a diagnosis of sleep apnnea. Which also makes it nice because we don't have to work with sleep physicians. I can just look at the sleep study and go, "Oh, I see what's going on." But because we're not and unfortunately it's a cutting edge appliance that doesn't we don't have any insurance coverage for it. And it's really when to get insurance coverage, you need to have that diagnosis of sleep apnea. So I can just look at their sleep study and say, "Yeah, there's some problems here and this is what we need to do and we can move forward with treatment." And what type of appliance is that? So the appliance is it looks like an upper retainer. Okay. And the nice thing is you put it in at night when you go to bed and you take it out in the morning and it has the little block that's a little higher on one side. Yeah, that's what you're saying. Mhm. I decided to make one of these for myself cuz I have a gag reflex. I don't like things in my mouth and I'd wanted to see, okay, what am I asking my poor patient? I always like to try things on myself if I can. Yeah, I I love to do that, too. Yeah, completely understand that. Yeah, it's easier to have conversations with people if you if you go, well, I've done this and this is kind of what you have to look out for. And I put this appliance in, and I went, not only is it not bad, I'm actually really liking how this feel. I could just feel my system calm down. And I was wearing an aura ring. um and I was only getting maybe 15 minutes of deep sleep. Now that being said, I found that the data from Aura rings and some of these sleep uh um monitors are not as accurate as because sometimes I would wear three or four different ones. Uhhuh. And they were all over the place. That's a good way to check. But in but you can use it as a baseline. Mhm. And so the first night I wore my appliance, I went from 15 minutes of deep sleep to to an hour and a half. Okay. and I consistently had. So, what appliance would you recommend because a lot of people wearing those order rings uh as a guideline like how the I don't I don't I don't know enough about the accuracy. you would almost have to wear all of those appliances and then wear them in a sleep lab and kind of see. And I don't know if anybody has been willing to do that, but you know, Apple watches, um, Garmin watches, Whoop bands, Fitbits, I mean, they all seems like they all you know, I think it's a good it's kind of like the blood pressure monitors we have in the office. It's not going to you're not going to make a diagnosis, but I think they're good enough that they tell you, yeah, there's a problem. Interesting. And uh so I think whatever you use is better than nothing. So when you were using on yourself, what did you notice? Longer deep sleep. I noticed I noticed that it comes down to again, you know, we talk about sleep and oh, I got seven hours or I got eight hours. I go, if you talk about eating healthy, you don't say, I ate four plates of food yesterday. You're like, yeah, well, what was on them? It's the same thing about sleep. It's like, okay, wellity was the quality sleep. So, I found that sometimes even if I only got maybe five hours of sleep, if I got good REM and deep sleep, I felt awesome. But if I didn't wear my appliance and I would get seven or eight hours and I would feel horrible going, "Yeah, I I don't feel like I slept well." So, it really it really does come and that's why I like my appliance because sometimes we don't always in modern society get as as the length of sleep that we should. Uh, and if you if I can wear that appliance and at least in the time I do spend in bed, get good quality, that's that's a huge that's a huge benefit right there. And it's interesting because it's upper max max appliance because as far as I remember what I learned before, it mostly was lower, right, to kind of push your jaw forward, but then it messes up your uh TMJ, there's some uh some disturbances. Uh, so very interesting. Well, that was the interesting thing. Everything was always about the mandible, always mandible. And so it was really interesting when I when I when I learned about this appliance and I read the book Breath by James Netor, I found out it's all about the maxilla. It's the maxilla that's underdeveloped. And you know, think of the maxilla as the shoe and your lower jaw is the foot. Well, what happens if you try to put your foot in a in a shoe that's too small? You know, your heel is sticking out the back. Well, that's that's our tongues being pushed into the back of the airway. So when you grow that maxilla and you do get you know you because it does have an expansion screw and we're seeing the growth. Now the interesting thing about the expansion screw on the home block is that patients turn that key to keep up with changes that have already been created. It's not like in children where you're turning the key and you're pushing. Yeah. They're turning the key and then it should just pop right back in. And after usually 9 to 12 months they'll turn the key and when they put it in go that fits tight. Then we say back it off. Don't We're not forcing anything. So, does it move your tilt your teeth out? No. It It does something. Even though the expansion screw looks like it's linear, it's probably doing something like this. It's an orthopedic appliance. It's not moving the teeth at all. It's only simulating It's only simulating the the hard food in our diet. So, that's what it's replacing. And certainly chewing on beef jerky wouldn't move teeth out of the bone. So it sounds like it's not orthopedic. So from orthopedic point of view, what does it do to the bone? It's just it's well it's probably causing some tipping of the palo bones. It's just like you get just like you get just like mouth breathers get that vaulted pal kind of moving things in the opposite direction. So when you do that you're creating more nasal volume because the roof of the mouth is the floor of the nose and you're and the tongue is not sitting up in the space anymore. And as you're creating that width, you're also creating more tongue space. Okay. And then it allows like I noticed they messed, you know, orthodontist messed me up. I had crowding. They pulled four by cusps and I had this really deep bite. Well, when I wore the home block and then did I followed up with some clear liners. I realized on my bite actually on here. So it allowed my jaw to come down and forward. So now I I would have a big open bite where my if I bit the way I wanted to. So now I'm going to have my back teeth built up to that bite to see how I tolerate that. But I'm going to I'm going to probably get my bite back to where it should be just by allowing that jaw to come down and forward. So jaw comes down in former in TMJ itself. Does it have any any effect on TMJ? This it does. It does. It's very uh it and there's a lot of obviously TMJ is another one of those subjects where there's a lot of different reasons why people have TMJ issues. But it's interesting that when people are doing that clenching and grinding to keep their airways open, the forces they're putting on their teeth are four to five times what you do while you're awake. Oh wow. There wasn't a there was a little um device called the the um Gem Pro and I I I did this at actually the the seminar where I learned about the Oh, no it wasn't at the home block. It was the previous appliance that I was working with. Uh but you put it in between your teeth and you sleep with it and it measures the biting forces. The last thing you do before you go to bed is bite down as hard as you can. The forces in your sleep four to five times when your maximum biting when you're awake. And when I saw that, I go, "Well, that explains why patients are breaking some of the things where I think it's impossible for you to break this." Well, when you see the forces people put on their their teeth, um, well, what do you think that does to their joints, destroying them? Yeah. And they're grinding their teeth away. So, that's why we see so many of those those signs and symptoms in the mouth sometimes. Look at look at some especially women that you you talk to them and they say, "I've always taken good care of my teeth." and you look and you have a couple root canals and a missing tooth and three or four crowns. Well, why why are teeth in that shape if you've always taken care of them? Well, when you think about and they say, "Yeah, I've been clenching and grinding since I've been a kid." Now, you go, "Okay, that makes perfect sense that when you're putting those types of forces on your teeth every night, I mean, teeth are amazing little structures. You know that stronger than bone. We can chew on them for 80 years, but not if you're not if you're chewing on them at four to five times what they were designed to. design to withhold. One question I always have in my head when I look at the kid for example or teenagers sometimes you see acclusal wear significant acclusal wear but also g there's a possibility that they have gastric reflux right that's total air and they look completely like similar so to tell the difference well the gird is also really that negative pressure with some of these airway problems so gird can actually be related it's again what's first the chicken or the egg yes yes airway iss issues can create can create this reflux and then of course you're also doing the clenching and grinding and now you have this high acid levels and yeah they can destroy you. Yes. And you have full mouth of decay right there and then. Yeah. Little throw in a little mouth breathing and and little candy before bedtime. Yeah. Yeah. We see it all. We see it all. Definitely. Yeah. It's very interesting to observe because uh it's very hard to see a difference between actually acid and grinding. I thought about that. It's probably interrelated how somehow. Yeah. You mentioned in the beginning that's bad wedding, right? It's a big problem for little kids. Mom is going through potty training and poor guy or girl could not it's an arousal mechanism to keep themselves breathing. Yeah. Bedwing is a total airway related issue. Totally airway related issue. Yes. Mhm. Tossing and turning, unrested, like waking up and so on. Whenever the body is doing anything, my first question isn't like what's happening. My question is why? Because you know our bodies are intelligent. Everything it does, it does for a reason. And so whenever the body's doing something, I always want to know why is it doing that? Because there's always, you know, I consider our bodies to be intelligent and to not just do things because they're bor, you know, our body's bored. It's, you know, our bodies are, you know, survival mechanisms. So they're, you know, it's trying to figure out how to keep us alive at all times. And why is it grinding away the hardest substance in our body? It's willing to sacrifice that tooth structure to keep us breathing to keep us alive. Yeah. Yeah. So you have a special protocol, right? How you technically approach different type of um appliances is one of them. What else is in that um spectrum? So we use in conjunction with the appliance. Like I said, the to me the appliance is the lowhanging fruit. feel anybody on the spectrum can benefit from that because we're all somewhat deficient. You know, we're we're all not perfect breathers and not most of us aren't full-blown apnea patients. So, it's nice to have an appliance that anybody could benefit from and doesn't need a diagnosis of sleep apnea for. Um, we're also using a procedure called Night, which is a dual wavelength laser that helps tone and tighten tissues. And there's a new there's a new protocol called the C3 protocol that where we're treating the floor of the mouth and that helps move the geneoglosses muscle forward. We treat the soft pallet and we treat the top of the tongue. We can actually shrink the size of the tongue. So is a CO2 laser on a low. It's actually it's not I'm not I'm not a fan of the CO2 laser except for it's a very good for doing things like tongue ties cutting laser. This is an ND egg and herbium egg y and the egg. And so the end egg is kind of a warms the tissue and we heat the tissue for example the frenum the the tongue ties I heat that tissue and we try to get it to about 42 degrees centigrade and I try to do a manual stretch we can do some because there's hyaluronic acid that's released in the fascia at that temperature and you're also destroying atapose tissue at that temperature and then the herbium is almost like microching. It's like doing cool sculpt on the tongue, but you you create these micro channels and then you get neocallogenesis where you get collagen kind of forming and tightening around that. So you get lifting of the soft pallet and you get tight and more because it's all about collapsibility in the in the very interesting approach. Yeah. And then um I just about a year ago switched from the the Invisalign and Sure Smile to a program called uh Pro Monitoring which is also known by the name it was Candid Pro and then there's a company that uh Glide Wild Dental that that you that they called Pro Monitoring u there that protocol was developed by an airway dentist and who did 30 some thousand cases of Invisalign as both as a mentor and in a teaching type environment and he didn't like the fact that even Invisalign with doing IPR IPR is still inter I should mention what that is interroximal reduction reduction yes when we have crowded teeth yeah instead of thinning and slenderizing the teeth they're all about let's move and and improve the arch form so they're all about properly tipping the teeth and moving everything out to get that to get that proper arch form and they when you do the treatment plan with them you can do standard treatment plan or an airway treatment plan. What's the difference between standard and airway? They they are a little bit more aggressive with with with widening that arch form and uh and creating more space. So all three of those companies separately the the homeblock the the the u the Fetona laser the the pro monitoring they all kind of claim to treat sleep apnnea separately. So what I've kind of developed is my own protocol. Depending on what's going on with patients, I usually start with the home block. And then depending on what's going on, I will go ahead and say you can benefit from the laser. And then once we're done with the treatment with the home block, once they get to the point where they turning that screw and it's not there's no more changes, then we do a re-evaluation to see, you know, are those are those molers tipped in? Can we benefit from just tipping those out or or you know creating that proper arch form? Generally the bite stays really good with the with the homeop block because we're not moving any teeth. But you know sometimes we still want to get that nice broad smile that gives a nice appearance but it also is beneficial for breathing and uh and um and more tongue space and success rate. What is success rate to do do you do studies sleep studies afterwards? I would say uh we're probably up around 90% of patients uh once they start on the program. The nice thing is patients love the appliance. That's good. It's comfortable. They only have to wear it at night so they can keep it in their nightstand and it's an easy habit to get into and once they start on the program they love it and they stay on it and probably 90% of the patients come back and say this is this is helping me tremendously and it's made a huge impact on my health. And a lot of our patients in a holistic practice, they're already they've already made lifestyle changes. They've already made all these changes and they're frustrated because they're going, "Wait a minute. I'm already doing the nutrition. I'm trying to do all these things. Okay, why am I still not feeling as good as I think I should?" So then when you add I call this appliance the kind of the missing piece of the puzzle. When you calm their autonomic nervous system down at night and you get them breathing and sleeping better, now they really they really thrive. Interesting. So it's technically it's kind of the group of population people you see they're already into healthy lifestyle. So the modification on the other side is not as significant. So it's just airway like a last piecing last block. What do you think about CPAP machine? Because traditional approach is CPAP. What do you think? It's I mean it's it's a rescue remedy. It obviously helps keep some patients alive but it's it's a horrible long-term solution for a couple reasons. Number one, you're just forcing air down into the lungs. You're not when you when you don't have that proper nasal breathing, you're not warming and humidifying the air. You're not filtering the air. You're not producing nitric oxide. Uh that having that apply that mask that mask on with a strap, they've shown that you're you're actually moving the maxilla back into the into the airway. So, it's doing the complete opposite of what you want. And of course, it's, you know, it's it's very disruptive to people. I've never seen anybody have a sleep study. Their AHI may go down, but their sleep quality is really poor. So, they're not getting they're not getting good restorative sleep when they're on the CPAP. Okay. So, they're getting air, but not good sleep. Yes. And so, they're showing even now that that the number of strokes and heart attacks that that CPAP really isn't having a major impact on reducing those. Wow. Yeah. What about this new implants? I think it's an inspired. Did you hear about that? The one which simulates high Yeah. Yeah. implantation. Yeah. You know, I have a friend who have I'm just curious. It's a pretty drastic procedure. Drastic procedure. Yeah. And I don't think once you have it implanted, they say like trying to remove it is almost impossible. Oh wow. Um it's it obviously doesn't resonate with people. I saw I I was talking to someone. and they said they've done over 400,000 Inspire consultations but only done about 8,000 procedures. So that kind of shows you it's a very very small percentage of I know one person who has this appliance and his feedback was that in the middle of the night his tongue goes like rip. Yeah. And wakes him up. So I was thinking about the the quality of sleep in this case probably not the best because you have mobility of tongue. So when you stop breathing principle is right it stimulates the tongue and kind of moves forward. Right. Right. Exactly. It's just a Yeah. It's like a little uh garage door opener size implant here and then the wire runs up into the gene's muscle and it basically just Yeah, it is. Yeah. And it just fires to stimulate the tongue to move. Yeah. I think it there's a sensor that detects when it's when there's when when it's needed. But I I was I was actually doing a lecture with an with an ENT specialist and he brought a patient in and he was talking about it and they said, "Yeah, one time I left the house and I forgot to turn it off and all of a sudden I'm driving and my tongue starts doing this crazy stuff." So I you know and I'm not anti to me all of all of the procedures including CPAP, mandibular advancement, all those things, they're all tools in our tool box. Yeah. And I always feel that let's start with the thing where we where we signal our body and let our body do what it's capable of first. And then you can always go to plan B and C and D, you know, mar and and other type of things. Those are all tools, but they're not the first tool I want to go to. The first tool I want to go to is how can we stimulate your body to do what it was meant to do in the first place. What do you think about Murphy plants? Again, it's it's a tool. There's there's some patients that depending on how they respond to the oral appliances and you know whether they're compliant um because I think they can do it until like 30 something right 37 because it's TADS right TAD implanted and you same principle as RP but a lot of that I mean we're seeing we're seeing patients into their 70s and 80s that are taking that key and turning it and getting three four five millimeters of expansion on the on the homeblock appliance and so that's something that that you can do at almost any stage in your life. Very interesting. So do you think it's just rotating the maxive place, right? It's not like actually opening the suture itself. No. No. I mean that suture closed and that's why I don't like calling it an expansion screw because especially when you talk to dentists they kind of like no you can't. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Uh I go uh No, it's it's really you're stimulating remodeling and then the expansion screw is just to keep up with those with the changes that are happening. And it's interesting because some patients, they can turn that expansion screw and the appliance fits really well for a long time. Other people, the way their body remodels, they turn a key a couple times and you're like, "Oh my gosh, this appliance doesn't fit at all because of the the way the bones are changing." U so it's really interesting how the body can respond. So, what do I'm curious chiropractic care think about this type of appliance? Well, you know, the problem with chiropractors is that a lot of times they're treating patients with forward head posture. So, a forward head posture or I call the CPR position where they patients kind of tip their head back is a position where patients create a more stable airway. So, if the if the patient goes into the chiropractor because they have neck and shoulder pain and the doc and the chiropractor moves the head back to that position, guess where the head's going to go once they walk out that front door if the body says, "I breathe better here." They're they're never going to be able to fix that problem until the airway is fixed. Now, that being said, chiropractic working in conjunction, yes, with this is really powerful. There's actually a group of chiropractors and physical therapists called PRI, postural restoration institute that by proper breathing and mobilizing the rib cage can do really some amazing things but you still have to treat ultimately that root cause underlying condition why when you work together it's it's very very powerful huh interesting so it seems like it's has to be multipety collaboration you know what I it really is I We work with allergists, we work with ENTs, we work with, you know, myofunctional therapists. You can't be Yeah. It's not just I I tell my patients, I said, "This home block is part of a protocol." I go, "I wish this was the magic appliance. I could just say, "Here you go. You put this in and all your problems will go away." Uh, and you do have to unravel a lot of problems. And even look at things like, you know, so many people even self-sabotage. You know, they're they're telling me, "Yeah, you know, I'm you know, I'm having three or four glasses of wine and and I'm on my iPad till one o'clock in the morning." Oh, yeah. My my favorite joke is sleep is good. My favorite joke is where the guy goes, I would do anything to get eight hours of sleep. And the other guy goes, "Well, how about going to bed eight hours before you have to wake up?" He goes, "Yeah, no, I won't do that." But it it tells us that sometimes people are like, "Okay, you're complaining about your sleep, but you're not doing anything to help yourself." Uh so you know there's still human nature that we're that we're fighting sometimes with airway and habits that we have to correct. What about allergists? Yeah, that's huge. So that's huge. We send a lot of and that's the big thing I look at on the cone beam and uh you know before we send them to an ENT to do turbonate reductions. It's like well let's find out why are your turbinates enlarge? Why are adoids enlarged? Let's find out. And we're finding out there's a lot of foods, even more than environmental, it's foods that people are allergic to. You know, it used to be gluten and dairy. Now people come back, they're like, "Oh my god, I found out I was allergic to pineapple." Oh wow. So you know, so you actually do work with allergist as well and sometimes even with ENT. Yes. Yeah, we work with all of those people. So you do find for example if there is a bigger issue you can see right on you can see adenoid, right? Ifenoid is enlarged. Mhm. And then at this point we kind of if we removing it we're still working with appliance. Would it fix itself if we remove adenoid for example? You know what I mean? Those are those are lymphatic and you know tissues. I mean there's again there's a reason why they're enlarged. So let's find out what's going on and try that first and if it if it doesn't work you can always go to an ENT and you know when in doubt slice it out approach. Yeah. Because I mean my understanding of leopix is tissue certain point like we reached the seven eight it kind of start to shrink. So when we have an adult with enlarged I don't know that has to be something else. There's something going on involved and then to fix that you have to find the root cause right that's and so that's always my goal and for some people it works for some people it doesn't and then for those you can always say well let's see what else we can do but I would always prefer people not to have to have a surgery surgical procedure if there's something we can do that's that's less invasive. Yeah. So I always ask my um guests tell me about the your favorite case which kind of dear dear to your heart that you changed somebody's life and you remember so clearly. Well uh I just had a patient uh he was he was a pilot. He flew for United Arab Emirates, the big, you know, the big huge air buses. And during CO, he actually he got CO and apparently they don't have the same uh HR departments in some of these overseas companies and they fired him because he got CO. They they let him go and he now is flying for Spirit Airlines here in the States and um he developed sleep apnea and he couldn't wear his you know he couldn't wear his seat the CPAP and they basically said you you're going to lose your job and so we we he had heard about me from another patient he he actually lives in Las Vegas. Oh wow. And you know he came in, we started him on the home block and we did the nightly procedure. We did a lot of testing and more sleep studies and after about six months we retested him and he was almost normal. So I I was able to write a letter. I showed them the before studies, the after what we did and I sent a letter to the FAA and they and they cleared them. They said, "Here, you're you're good to fly for the next two years." and he just he always writes me letters saying, "Hey, thank you for saving my job." He's he's this fisherman. He goes up to Alaska and he'll like he'll like send me and my airway assistant uh like salmon from Alaska. He's like, "I'm just so happy." He goes, "As long as you keep me, you know, flying, I'll keep sending you salmon." Salmon. That's good. And so, I mean, you think about like, you know, like saving, you know, someone someone's, you know, career like that is. And there's actually another pilot that this very very similar situation. Uh so it's and there's there's there's so many stories, you know, just, you know, people telling me that they were able to share the same bedroom with their with their their spouses again. Yes. I I can tell you so many stories about that because we deal with pregnant mothers a lot of young moms with multiple children and that's a big part of it. Yeah. So this is definitely I mean I have to say you know I told you I've been you know doing dentistry for 40 years and being a cerak doctor and being at the chair is very is is tough on your body. So to kind of have this final stage in my career where it's it's very I love the fact that I've got you know people who can kind of gather all the information and I just kind of get to talk to patients and develop the treatment plans. Uh but to be able to do something as kind of in the late later stages of my career that's this rewarding and this life-changing for people has really been that's amazing. Yeah. I'm I'm very grateful for how my career you know has gone and to be able to do this now. You can actually change people life. Yeah. You can save lives because if you cannot breathe you might have a heart attack early and I mean that's why we go into the holistic and integrative. It's like we want to we want to help people's health and but those things you know when you take out amalgams or pull an infected root canal it still takes time they have to detox and it takes a while before they feel better to all of a sudden do something where they come back in two weeks and say I feel like I have my life backing really yeah so at this point you don't practice clinical dentistry do you I haven't you know I haven't drilled in about three and a half years now wow so it's a mostly airway that's very interesting that's impressive it's whole different field I love that our specialty in general is like evolving because I always felt that initially that dentistry kind of a separate corner in this whole medical field but then your mouth you know what we are really that's what Price kind of taught me is that health starts in the mouth and Dr. Dr. Felix Liao who wrote the book Six Foot Tiger Thoot Cage was one of my mentors and he says you know our lungs are to us what what roots are to the plant and like these are the roots of our our health and yeah to be able to have it really we really are physicians who specialize in the oral cavity and I always say I kind of joke when you say I want to make start making video you know how they always joke about oh you're a doctor oh you're just a dentist you're not a real doctor it's like well you Who's, you know, I really feel like dentists, we really sell ourselves short. We're so mechanically trained, yet the area area we're working in, we really are have more of an effect on patients health than than any doctor almost out there. For sure. And we get to see our patients a couple times a year. We get to communicate with them. We we have so much closer connection to our patients than than most doctors ever can, you know, because I mean, we build long-term relationships. How many doctors get to do that? Yeah, long lifelong sometimes because you see like I see some kids who I see as a newborn for tongue ties and lip ties release and then I see them at the end of 18 graduating uh high school. On this positive note, what do you think we didn't cover in this podcast? I think you did a really good job of covering most of it. I really, you know, just kind of like where we ended up that that that, you know, seeing the right dentist because I think dentistry is one of those professions that can also do a lot of harm and I think we have by putting, you know, I feel like some of the the the mercury restor, you know, those mercury releasing restorations and even some of the other metals, uh, you know, not being aware that root canals can be problematic. I don't I'm not a believer that all root canals are bad like some holistic dentists are but certainly not recognizing that some some root canals can be very toxic. So dentistry can do a lot of harm but it can also it's it's a big spectrum. We can also have more of a positive impact on our patients health than almost any anything out there. Of course. Of course. Especially I like that in our in my lifetime I already see Mercury feelings kind of phasing out and I think there's such a big awareness of it. So like when I opened my first practice I didn't even have equipment to to place amalgams. I don't have equipment to place amount because you have to have a special filtration system. I I and I don't see it in kids. Once in a while we'll get a kid from different state usually uh for some reason from California because I always thought California is um more organic oriented or naturopathic but we would see with amalgam but it's very rare when we see that in root cows I think root cows if it's properly done I actually had the dentist on my podcast and he was telling me how evolving that special is you know we use uh it's it's not like it's similar to the gentle way, but you're using you're using um the laser pulses to you're you're cleaning doing much better job cleaning out, especially if you use things like ozenated water, which is much more powerful than than than the the chlorine chlorinated products that they're that they're using. Talking about that, when I was growing up, I have interesting fact. part of the city where I was growing up had actually instead of chlorinated water, it was ozenated water. Oh. So they use ozone to disinfect the water supplies. That was very interesting. And I saw that it's actually wild widespread. You know, they did that I think in Los Angeles. They used an oenating. I don't know if they did it for the whole city, but that's Yeah, a lot of I mean obviously a lot of that technology came from Germany and and Eastern Europe. There's a lot of a lot of the ozone is very it's I could spend a whole I'm I'm actually the chairman of the ozone committee for the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology. So I'm I've been doing ozone in my practice since about for 20 years now. Oh wow. Yeah. We use it to disinfect our water lines. We inject it around, you know, sometimes people have a root canal tooth and they're like, "Hey, I've heard bad things about it. Should I get it out?" And if we look at it and evaluate it and say, well, I think pulling this tooth would create more of a problem than I think it's creating, but let's infuse the area around this tooth with ozenated oxygen. And it's a good way to kind of mitigate and, you know, because I mean, let's face it, disease is always the bugs against the immune system. So, if we can reduce the number of bugs and boost your immune system, then at least we're doing something good and we're not creating a problem by pulling a tooth that may or may not have a, you know, impact on your health. Yeah. especially if it's like um it's not a live tooth but at least it's not infected tooth right and I think no matter what is better than some kind of artificial implant no matter what because uh you you think about implants that they are safe no matter what but you hear a lot of stories about failing implants well yeah and actually I used to do a lot of lectures uh for the OOMT on on the titanium versus zirconia so I've been doing the zirconia implants since about I think 2012 12. So we've only done the non- metallic implants in our practice for the last maybe 13 14 years. Yes. And that technology I think is getting more better and better better and better. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming to my studio. It was pleasure to see you. Very very interesting conversation. And to my audience guys if you like our topics we cover please comment below. Give us a lot of thumbs ups and share with your friends and family because we we're talking to different professions, different untraditional approach and we'd like to see your feedback. Stay tuned. Welcome to the Ask the Dentist podcast with Dr. Olga dog ear where your smile meets your overall